“Silicon Valley as a service”

Having the chance to visit San Francisco and Silicon Valley in an EU funded softlanding-program I found myself collecting quotations form people we met. Here my selected favorites:

• “China is Rocket Internet at large scale” stated by Carlos Diaz from Refiners Seed Fund. He was a real great source for quotations: “VCs are under high pressure because they do not want to miss the next UBER”. And “In Silicon Valley it is not a question of being better – the question is to be different" and “Gobal startups are startups who’s first customer could be anywhere. And these startups need to be in Silicon Valley.” (See: https://www.dhirubhai.net/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6469336103894683648). This - and more - might have brought @Kamil Barbarski to his idea to call it "Silicon Valley as a Service".
• “Berlin is overestimated” stated by Marvin Liao from 500 Startups – however, when asked privately, he knew several VCs from Berlin, like Project A, that “do a good job” (see: https://www.dhirubhai.net/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6467980249891110912)
• Mark Searle, Professor at Barkeley, gives the advice: “Enlarge the population that is keen to test ideas and provide test-beds and test-opportunities.”
• Isabelle Lescent-Giles, Professor at HULT Business School, admitted: “Main USP for Silicon Valley is the weather, second being the mindset: people are addicted to ideas, innovations and speed.” (See: https://www.dhirubhai.net/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6468552517746720768)
• “Silicon Valley is not a landscape, it is a mindset of success” is what we hear everywhere.

Within the group we had a lot of really meaningful discussions, the one that was most interesting was about "toxic money" that could be public money that might have unwanted effects - on Ecosystem level: like fostering only selected players and thus neglecting others - as well as on team-level: like stopping teams from quick failure.

If I was to give three mayor learning outcomes, here they are:

1. In Silicon Valley talent is scarce too. This is due to the fact that “everybody” wants to work with google or facebook. We met a successful serial founder that happily ended up (till now) as PM somewhere in the facebook messenger team.
2. Silicon Valley is expensive, really expensive. This was described by the fact that even successful entrepreneurs that sold their company cannot afford a basketball-court in the garden. As a direct outcome of this expensiveness it becomes more and more usual to have geographically distributed teams. The CEO or Head of VC-contacts should be at Silicon Valley, the other parts of the team could be anywhere.
3. When coming to San Francisco the first thing you see: homeless people in the central districts, even camping on the sidewalks. We do have homeless people in Berlin too, but not that amount.

One conclusion:

Carlos Diaz stated (a little bit taken out of the context I admit): “I don’t need friends, I need business”. I think we outside of Silicon Valley can learn a lot from this mentality, however, we also need to see beyond.